The Trade in Child Pornography

The first media exposés about a purported massive trade in child
pornography started in the U.S.A., England and Scandinavia at the end of
the 1970s. They reached the Netherlands for the first time in
1984, causing shock and fascinated indignation, in part because of the
claims of the enormous volume of business. In the Netherlands,
child pornography had only appeared in the media as incidental to other
stories. An example is the so-called "Mini-love
affair," where a complaint was lodged against parents who had
permitted a pornographer access to their children, and against the
photographer himself.1

However, child pornography was not a public issue
in the Netherlands, even though photographs of children were openly for
sale in most pornography shops. In the classified advertising
section of Vrij Nederland,2
undisguised offers of child pornography regularly appeared.3
That changed in July 1984, when police raided a number of Amsterdam sex
shops. The raids were featured prominently in press and television
news. Police spokesman Klaas Wilting said the situation had
"completely run out of hand." He said the market for
child pornography was large, representing millions of guilders. He
claimed the sex shop owners told him child pornography was half of their
turnover. Also, contents of the confiscated material were
described as shocking. "On the films and videos you can see
that the children have been used against their will. The horror
radiates from their faces."4
The media reported eight cubic meters of child pornography was
seized. This was repeated as fact in the Lower House5
and not questioned by the Minister of Justice,6
although the quantity was actually a small fraction of that.7
Most of the media, knowing nothing about the subject, accepted the
information as true.

In November, 1984, at hearings in the U.S. Senate
the claim was made that child auctions for the purpose of sex slavery
and pornography were held regularly in Amsterdam. In the same
month a group of American Senators visited the Netherlands to show their
dismay and put pressure on the Dutch government to act. Disbelief
and indignation mixed with the suspicion that some of the stories must
be true and that a serious response to the American allegations was
needed to prevent an impression of laxity. Of print media, only Vrij
NederLand8 published a critical
article expressing skepticism over the claim that 50% of the total
pornography trade was child pornography.9

We pressed, more or less, the people in the shops to stop selling
child pornography. We said "We will arrest you if you
continue with it, because it's forbidden and we won't allow you to
have it (in stock). We will be very strict in
future." And they said, "Well, it's only 1% of our
turnover and we don't like to have problems with the police.
It's not big business for us, so we will stop."10

Nevertheless, Mr. Wilting's claims appeared to be
confirmed in May 1987, when the large child pornography scandal broke
out in the village of Oude Pekela11
in the northern province of Groningen. Dozens of children were
said to have been enticed away by child pornographers dressed as clowns,
and then abused, filmed and drugged before being returned to parents
who, it was later reported, had never noticed anything. Claims of
sacrificial offerings, and drinking of blood and satanism12
were overshadowed by the stories of pornography manufacture, which
touched a sensitive chord among Dutch people.

The stories confirmed the recurring theme in the
media charging laxity by the government which, it was said, had slept
while the child pornographers went freely about their business.13Defence for Children International (DCI), a private international
organization for the protection of children recognized by the United
Nations as a Non-Governmental Organization, continued hammering on the
theme. It claimed that annual profits of five billion dollars were
made on child sex and child pornography.14
Sometimes the claims escalated to ten billion dollars,15
and sexual exploitation, trade in children, and child pornography was
said to be increasing.

Where the figure of ten billion came from remains
unclear. The claim was also not supported in the final report of
the U.S. Senate Commission on child pornography and pedophilia which
came out in 1986, under the chairmanship of William V. Roth, Jr.
The Commission concluded that:

The most generous estimates of the value of foreign child
pornography entering the United States  according to known
seizure figures  would probably not exceed $5 million.16

Emphatic assertions by independent individuals
claiming an enormous trade existed, followed by denial in official
reports, formed the pattern of the public discussion during the
1980s. It should be borne in mind that these reports periodically
appeared after the time Parliament and the Justice Department took a
stand against child pornography. As a result of official actions
against child pornography, the trade, which had actually never been
large, disappeared almost immediately, as confirmed by Mr. Rijk.
Before that, in the 1970s and early 1980s, a visible market for child
pornography existed, which, until now, has never been accurately
charted. The total number of children involved has also remained
unknown.17

In this study we made an attempt to analyze this trade quantitatively
and qualitatively. We made an estimate of the turnover, the number
of children involved and performed an analysis of the content of the
pornography. It should be remembered that such an analysis cannot
be exact. The data had to be collected from here and there and in
some instances we had to use information from pornographers and
traders. We considered this acceptable, since our conclusions on
the basis of this information confirmed the claims made by institutional
opponents of child pornography, namely the governments involved.
Our conclusions were never disconfirmed with hard evidence by third
parties such as DCI and other anti-pornography crusaders, whose
unsupported claims were often several orders of magnitude greater.
In our study we narrowed the range to a more realistic level.

In 1976 Robin Lloyd, correspondent for NBC, published For Money or
Love: Boy Prostitution in America ()().18
In the book, for which a U.S. senator had written an introduction, Lloyd
claimed that a huge network of prostitution involving 300,000 boys
existed. The notion that child pornography trade is big business
was initiated in this book. Yet, nowhere in the book is there any
empirical basis for the number 300,000. Indeed, Lloyd admitted
that it was a working hypothesis which he had suggested to a number of
experts to test their reactions.19
This didn't prevent Judianne Densen-Gerber, director of Odyssey
House, a
chain of residential treatment clinics for drug addicts, from taking
over the figure as if it represented a reliable statistic. She set
about to mobilize public opinion against child pornography to which, she
said, Lloyd had alerted her.

The media followed the stories of child
exploitation in detail. In the national periodicals during 1977
nine articles appeared.20
The New York Times, a paper known to avoid sensationalism,
printed 27 articles that year compared to one in the two years
before. When in May, 1977 the highly popular television series Sixty
Minutes devoted a program to child pornography, a tidal wave of
letters to politicians resulted.21
That spring a subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary of the
House of Representatives held a series of hearings on the subject which
lasted until autumn, keeping child pornography in the news in the
U.S.A. A platform was established by crusaders against child
pornography, and in the prevailing climate of moral panic their cries
for stronger measures received wide political support.

The chairman of the committee was Representative
John Conyers Jr., who had organized the hearings to pass judgment on the
proposal of Representatives Kildee and Murphy for a first Federal law
against child pornography. It was this series of hearings that
would make the question of child pornography a national issue. The
first hearing was dominated by the appearance of Judianne
Densen-Gerber. Equipped. with some child pornography magazines,
she shocked congressional representatives with her claim that she had,
together with Robin Lloyd, counted 264 comparable publications that,
according to her, appeared monthly (an exaggeration by a factor of
several orders of magnitude as we shall see). The figures which
Robin Lloyd had mentioned as a working hypothesis were repeated by
Densen-Gerber as fact:

Lloyd's book documented the involvement of 300,000 boys, aged 8 to
16, in activities revolving around sex for sale.22

She then multiplied the number by two, because
her intuition told her that 300,000 girls were also involved in such
activities. She then multiplied it again by two since, according
to Lloyd, the real figure was "twice what he (could) statistically
validate,"23 and this lead to
something like a million children. The chairman Conyers multiplied
this again by two since, he reasoned, America had not only one million
runaways but another one million school drop outs. In this way the
contours of a national disaster were drawn. According to Conyers:

"So we have somewhere possibly in the neighbourhood of 2
million kids who form a ready market for sexual exploitation from
pornographers and the like."24

Densen-Gerber could not agree more. The Kildee-Murphy proposal
was made law without any opposition: 401 for, 0 against.

The claims of the crusaders that lay at the foundation of the new law
turned out to be exaggerated. Two large scale government
investigations concluded that the claims were not based on any
facts. One investigation was carried out by a commission of the
Illinois State Legislature: The Illinois Legislative Investigating
Commission (ILIC). The immediate reason for the investigation was
the claim made by Judianne Densen-Gerber in 1977 that Chicago was a
stopover for boy prostitutes who were being transported back and forth
between New York, Los Angeles, Houston and New Orleans.25

After a three-year investigation in cooperation
with the FBI and the U.S. Postal Service and the
U.S. Customs, the
report of the ILIC was published in 1980. Undercover actions were
organized and persons in the commercial sex world, in addition to known
sex criminals, were interrogated. The report concluded that the
largest underground publication containing erotic images of children and
teenagers "could attract, at most, 1,000 individuals. Even if
each individual passed his copy on to several others, it takes a stretch
of the imagination to think that there are 50,000 to 100,000 readers of
child pornography 'out there,' particularly given the nature of the
other operations we have mentioned in this part of our report."26

The stories of child prostitution must have
conjured up frightening images in the imaginations of the public.
The fact that police and justice functionaries had not been able to
discover organized groups of teenage and child prostitutes anywhere made
no difference to the growing panic, and the original claims were
repeatedly cited as "facts." In the ILIC report it was
determined that the claims, given in evidence and written in books,
appeared undocumented and the authors were not able to support their
claims with any facts. This was true for Densen-Gerber's claim
that Chicago was a center of teenage prostitution. Furthermore,
the report revealed that at least one other of her anecdotes was
completely invented.27

According to an employee of Odyssey House,
everything that Densen-Gerber claimed to know about youth and child
prostitution had been taken from Robin Lloyd. Lloyd was also
criticized. He had first used the figure of 300,000 boy
prostitutes, but that later turned out to be based on nothing. To
the ILIC, Lloyd stated that he had "thrown out" a figure of
30,000. When it was suggested to him by police and justice
department people that this might be a conservative estimate, he revised
the figure to 300,000.28
When asked, however, he was unable to name any individuals or cite any
source for the statistic.

The figure of 30,000 was also given to the ILIC
by Lloyd Mar, an investigator of the Los Angeles Police
Department. This was his personal "conservative
estimate" of the number of boys that were exploited by pimps and
pornographers in the Los Angeles region alone.29
He gave no source either and it appears that he too had "thrown
out" 30,000 to see what would happen. To the ILIC Lloyd
Martin said that he had based his estimate on Robin Lloyd's claims.30
He was unable to name any other source.

The other investigation was carried out by the
FBI. At the end of 1977 the FBI started a sting operation under
the name of Miporn.31
Pornography distributors throughout the nation were raided and their
premises searched. The ILIC report summarized the findings of this
investigation as follows:

In their two years of searching for (child pornography) on a
commercial level, none was discovered. Furthermore, none of the
60 raids resulted in any seizures of child pornography, even though
the raids were comprehensive and nationwide.32

The trade in child pornography had only marginal value and was
vulnerable to pressure from outside. The public indignation and
the high penalties proscribed by the new laws, in combination with the
insignificant turnover and small profits, were sufficient to bring the
trade to an end.

In 1986 the Senate Commission33
under the chairmanship of William V. Roth, Republican from Delaware,
came to the same conclusion as the ILIC report. Nevertheless,
neither the Roth report nor the ILIC report were able to dampen the
spread of rumors about an enormous trade. Even in 1986, the claims
of Lloyd and Densen-Gerber continued to come up as facts in official
reports: the Meese Commission, initiated by the Reagan administration to
prepare a drastic sharpening of the anti-pornography laws, uncritically
took over these claims.34
According to the Meese Commission, Congress had discovered that child
pornography and child prostitution "have become highly organized,
multi-million dollar industries that operate on a nationwide
scale."35 The monthly
appearance of 264 magazines (Densen-Gerber) was again reported as truth,
alongside the 30,000 exploited children of Los Angeles (Lloyd Martin).

The U.S. Supreme Court took over these claims in
their first child pornography case, New York v Ferber (1982),
saying that child pornography comprised, "highly organized
multimillion dollar industries that operate on a nationwide scale."36
The otherwise dignified court was so upset by the alleged extent of the
problem that the solicitor for the accused, Herald Price Fahringer, lost
his composure and fled the sitting as fast as he could.37

The claims of Lloyd and Densen-Gerber also
appeared outside the U.S.A. The report, Exploitation of Child
Labour, which was submitted in 1981 to the Commission for Human
Rights of the United Nations, claimed: "In the United States there
are at least 264 pornographic magazines specializing in pornography
concerning children."38
It was claimed that in 1977, 15,000 slides and 4,000 films of child
pornography had been intercepted by the police, which was, according to
the report, 5% of the total stock in circulation.

According to the United Nations report, the value
of trade in child pornography in 1977 was estimated at $500
million. Such estimates are not based on any kind of empirical
evidence, and are easy to refute. If these claims were true then
the allegedly intercepted slides and films would have had a value of
thousands of dollars each.39
In reality, these films were sold for much less, which can be checked
with reference to the advertisement brochures of Deltaboek,
publisher of homosexual pornography and literature. From here it
is apparent that the Golden Boys film series, produced by COQ in
Denmark, cost 85 guilders each, which is about $35.

In 1986, Defence for Children International
prepared a report on child prostitution in which they claimed:
"Estimates on the number of child prostitutes vary from 300,000 to
several millions for the U.S. and Canada."40
A year later these figures were taken over by the Norwegian Ministry of
Justice.41 This report was
later submitted to the Ministers of Justice of the member countries of
the Council of Europe. Within the Council of Europe a report on
child exploitation was written in which it was claimed that: "A
study of boy prostitutes had suggested that there were 300,000 boy
prostitutes in the United States, many of whom are designated
runaways."42 The claims
of the United Nations report were also repeated. As late as 1988
the Dutch language world development magazine, Onze Wereld (Our
World), claimed that: "The American (sic) periodical43Child Abuse and Neglect reported that in the United States at
least 264 different child pornography magazines are in
circulation. The kiddieporn stars are drawn from the numerous
American runaway teenagers."44
The same article made similar exaggerated claims about alleged illicit
trade in donor organs obtained from children killed for the
purpose. The story about donor organs had also appeared in the
report of the Council of Europe, although there was never any evidence
and the story was not credible from the beginning.45

The alleged size of the child pornography trade and the many children
said to have been involved, are little more than myths. They are
the result of the arbitrary multiplication of arbitrary numbers of
alleged victims made by a journalist. The claims had taken on a
life of their own. The fact that these claims had by 1980 been
rejected by thorough official investigations was insufficient to prevent
the claim from reappearing, not only in the media but also in other
official circles, including the United States Senate, the United States
Supreme Court, a Commission of the American Justice Department, the
United Nations and the Council of Europe. After the number had
been cited in the Hearings of the House of Representatives, it became
associated with an ostensibly reliable source. The fact that the
original source was anything but reliable was forgotten.

New Laws, New Business

Offense against Decency, or Crimes of Abuse?

There was one main cause of the rise of child pornography trade
around 1970. In many countries the existing anti-pornography laws
were being dismantled at the legislative and at the judicial
levels. Except perhaps for some traders, no one could predict what
possibilities this would open up for the emerging pornography
industry. Apparently, this was a result of the fact that the law
was not concerned with the protection of those who posed for the making
of pornography, both adults and children; indeed, the distinction was
hardly made. In the decades before, the justification for
pornography censorship was the hypothesis of a negative moral effect on
the consumers. It was the moral scandal that was combated.
No one seemed to have the idea that protection of models and actors was
the task of justice. Indeed, pornography actors were perceived by
many as fallen individuals, among whom no moral fiber was left to
protect. In some places that is still the prevailing
attitude. In Belgium, for example, the model can still be
prosecuted for violation of public morals. Accordingly, the
manufacture and trade in pornography was constructed as an offense
against decency.

When liberalizing the pornography law in the Dutch parliament was
debated in 1984, arguments based on questions of morality or decency
hardly played any role. Discussion of the possible effect of
pornography on the consumer was restricted to concern that pornography
might encourage sexual violence or discrimination against women.
On the other hand, the fear that female models may be abused and
exploited for the manufacture of pornography had become the key
issue. Members of progressive Democrats (D66) and Christian
Democrats (CDA) proposed making the trade of pornography involving abuse
or exploitation of models illegal.46 These legal redefinitions would
have made certain instances of pornography trading into crimes of abuse.

The distribution of child pornography can
certainly be classified as a crime of abuse. In the prohibitions
against distribution of child pornography, as those in the U.S.A. and
England in 1977, in Denmark in 1980, and in the Netherlands in 1984, the
criterion of obscenity was absent. Professor T.M. Schalken, a
Dutch expert on pornography law, expressed it as follows:

The question is not whether looking at photographs offends the
moral sensibilities of the person looking, but if the co-operation of
children in sexual conduct damages their sexual integrity. They
are protected by the new article 240b (the prohibition on trade and
public display of child pornography). We should not concern
ourselves with those whom we may judge in moral terms, but with those
who actually need our protection.47

The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed this in the case
New York v Ferber, with the reasoning that punishing child
pornography did not depend on the question of its obscenity, a criterion
which applied to pornography in general:

Here the nature of the harm to be combated requires that the state
offense be limited to works that visually (italics in original)
depicts sexual conduct by children below a specified age.48

When the current Dutch Penal Code took effect in 1886, it reflected
the liberal political climate that had been inherited from the previous
two centuries and that dominated intellectual circles throughout most of
Europe.49 The law makers did
not see it as their duty to combat voluntary moral decay. The
government sought to intervene only when the sexual integrity of persons
or public order was threatened. Article 240 of the new law
prohibited the public distribution of "leaflets"50
that "offend decency."51

The political turnaround was not far away.52
As long as the franchise was limited to the small, taxpaying elite, the
liberal parties dominated the political scene. But the extension
of the franchise, starting in the 1890s, benefited both the Socialist
and Christian parties. The increase in the number of seats of
religious parties in parliament had an effect on the morality
laws. The devoutly Roman Catholic Minister of Justice, Mr. Regout,
defended his law for combating immorality53
with references to the escalating moral degradation which, according to
him, the land was falling prey to. The sale of all pornographic
material, text and image, was prohibited, and offering of commercial
pornography to youth under 16 was forbidden. In 1936 the limit was
increased to 18 years and non-commercial pornography was brought under
the prohibition. Although according to the law, persons 16 and
over were permitted to engage in (hetero)sexual contact, they were no
longer permitted to look at depictions of it; and for that matter, were
also not permitted to use contraceptives.

In the meantime the Supreme Court was able to
draw certain limits on the all too zealous prosecutorial activity of the
Public Ministry of Justice. In 1927 this court determined that public
exhibition of naked images was not automatically forbidden. Nudity
itself was not taken to be offensive to decency.54
It also established precedent to make an exception for the arts and
science (the exceptio artis et scientiae) that work with a
serious scientific or artistic value became exempt from the prohibition.

A formal relaxation of these articles came
eventually in 1986. However, by that time the judiciary had passed
the legislature. The 1960s had given rise to a rapid shift of
attitudes towards sexual morality in a more libertarian direction, and
the judiciary adjusted its practices accordingly. After a number
of controversial judgments in the lower courts, the Supreme Court took
the critical step. In a decision over Chick, the "sex
magazine for the worker," the Court determined that text or an
image could be classifiable as an offense against decency if "an
important majority of the population" considered it as such.55

The result was that judges could no longer rely
on their intuition to determine if an image was offensive.
Furthermore, the opinions of the "large majority" were rapidly
becoming more permissive. The effect of this decision was
effective elimination of the prohibition on pornography. The
effect on law enforcement can be documented: between 1961 and 1970, 447
convictions for offenses against the anti-pornography articles were
made, between 1971 and 1980 there were only 135, of which only 13
occurred after 1976.56

An attempt by the Minister of Justice A.A.M. van
Agt to resist this progressive tide by prosecuting sex film theaters
backfired. In the decision over the hard porn film Deep Throat,
the Supreme Court in 1978 determined that the non-public exhibition of
pornography to persons above 18 years of age, after informing the
viewers of the nature of what they are about to see, is not punishable.57
Indeed, one may assume that someone who goes to see such a film after
being informed of its contents will not be offended by it. In 1984
the Supreme Court carried this further by finding the postal
distribution of child pornography on order not punishable: the
recipients, after all, had ordered the material and it can therefore be
concluded that they would not be offended by it.58
The Deep Throat decision had hollowed out the anti-pornography
law: while the law remained on the books it was in fact an ineffective
relic of past morally righteous times.

Attempts to adjust the law failed twice.
The advice of the government advisory commission for morality laws,
under the chairmanship of the professor of law from Leyden University,
A.L. Melai,59 collided with the
stubborn inflexibility of the Minister A.A.M. Van Agt, a conservative
Catholic. Van Agt's successor, J. de Ruiter, accepted the advice
for a large part, but in 1981 was confronted by the rising influence of
the feminist movement which typified pornography as an incitement to
sexual violence and discrimination against women, and also pointed out
the absence of attention in the law to child pornography.60
In 1984, De Ruiter's successor, F. Korthals Altes, was able to carry the
new law through the Lower House despite the vote against by all members
of the religious parties. The new law took effect in 1986,
bringing us to the current position in the Netherlands. Today the
following acts are punishable:

"public offer and exhibition of images that offend
decency" (article 240: For "offense against decency"
the Chick decision still sets the precedent, so the number of
prosecutions for the time being will not be very great);

the display to children younger than 16 years of objects or images
that may be considered damaging for persons younger than 16 (article
240a);

the dissemination and public display of child pornography (article
240b).

At about the same time in most other countries the existing
pornography laws became more sharply defined. In the United States,
where the judiciary can declare a law invalid on the grounds that it
contravenes the Constitution,61
first amendment protection for pornography was eliminated by the 1973
Supreme Court decision in the case of Miller v California.62
The Court formulated the criterion of "obscene," which became
the basis for this exceptionalism, as material that "appeals to the
prurient interest of the average person" and that the images are
"patently offensive." After 1982, however, these
requirements were no longer necessary as a result of a decision by the
same court in the case of New York v Ferber. Child
pornography enjoyed no constitutional protection, nor was the exceptio
artis et scientiae any longer applicable.63

In the United States and the Netherlands laws
were kept in place which prohibited the sale or public display of films
or photos that offended decency. Although the laws did not mention
child pornography specifically, these items were included, so the sale
and public display of child pornography could to some extent be
prosecuted under these general laws. In Denmark the situation was
different, since the sale of offending material, including child
pornography, was not illegal. The anti-pornography laws had been
repealed in 1967 (for writings) and 1969 (pictures). Sweden had
followed in 1971.64 Both
countries retained prohibitions of undesired confrontation with
pornography. A booming trade in pornography was the result.
However, the boom petered out when Sweden and Denmark got fiercer
competition from other pornography centers, for the large part Germany
and the Netherlands. The general increase in freedom to publish
led to the appearance of material in the media and in ordinary shops
that was once available only in specialized pornography shops. The
need for such specialized shops diminished rapidly in Denmark and
Sweden.

Some pornography dealers were quicker to find the gaps that the law
had left open than the legislative members themselves. The Dane,
Willy Strauss, one of the first legal pornography dealers, boasts:

At most of the shops in Copenhagen there was only one kind of
pornography to buy. I saw very early on that there was something
better than ordinary pornography ... In 1971 I was the first to
sell child magazines, at least with photographs.65

In fact, although Strauss was one of the "pioneers" of this
market, he was not the first as we shall see later. Child
pornography appeared in 1970, almost immediately after the prohibition
had been repealed.

Other than the United States, where public sale
of child pornography brought Congress into action almost immediately,
the trade in a number of European countries, including Sweden, Denmark,
the Netherlands, and West Germany, was able to proceed for a decade
without any resistance. Although the trade was much smaller than
the trade in adult pornography, a small boom of sorts did take
place. There was no sign of public indignation. The Dutchman
Joop Wilhelmus had a run in with the police after the publication of his
first child pornography magazine, Lolita.66
However, after the Chick decision, activity from the police and
the Justice Department against such pornography receded. Under the
Minister of Justice, van Agt, trade in pornography was treated as a
question of offense against decency and the Department of Justice
therefore concentrated on pornography films with adults in theaters for
the greater public,67 where this
offense was considered to take place on the largest scale.

There was in the Netherlands, as elsewhere,
little tradition in fighting child pornography. Social
developments,68 including the
report of the Melai commission, made it unsure if child pornography was
offensive for an "important majority of the population" (the
criterion of the Chick decision). Until the 1970s there
existed film censorship for all ages, making it possible for the Dutch
government to prohibit films in which homosexual contact between adults
and minors was suggested, such as Schermerhoorn and IJ dijk,
both directed by Matthijs Seip. In the 1970s, however, puberty sex
taboos were broken.69 Eva
Ionesco (12), Laura Wendel (11) and Martin Loeb (17) in Maladolescenza
shed their clothes, while Natasja Kinski (14), Mariel Hemingway (13),
Brooke Shields (11), Benolt Ferreux (15) and Linda Blair (12) appeared
in revealing scenes.

Prosecution for child pornography received little
attention in the media at that time, except for some incidental
reports. In November 1970 the Amsterdam police acted against Guus
Dijkhuizen, the publisher of the booklet Mini-Love. The
book contained 65 naked and sexual photos of an 11-year-old girl and a
12-year-old boy. The media were more upset over the way in which
the children were interrogated by the police than about the book.
The children had been removed from school without the knowledge of their
parents and interrogated for a long period by two officers. Two
years later Dijkhuizen was acquitted of the charges of
"fornication" and "enticement to fornication."70
He had not been charged with disseminating pornography.71

In January 1971 Joop Wilhelmus, the publisher of Chick,
was arrested for distribution of the Lolita booklets,72
containing prototypical child pornography. This did not prevent
him from publishing more than 50 other issues of the Lolita
series, a magazine featuring some very young girls. In 1986 the
report of the U.S. Senate Commission on Child Pornography and Pedophilia
described the magazines as "the most notorious of the foreign
commercial child pornography," with good reason.73

In 1975 Wilhelmus was prosecuted again, this time
for photographs of 12-year-old twins from the town of Arnhem, a boy and
girl. Small articles appeared in some papers and the news died out
quickly. Chief Editor of the sensationalist magazine Panorama,
Gerard Vermeulen, called for increased penalties for the parents who had
provided the opportunity for the making of the photographs.
However, he discredited his appeal shortly thereafter by publishing in Panorama
the photographs of a 13-year-old Danish girl who "stripped for
grandma and grampa."74
Those were different times.

Shortly after child pornography had been made punishable in the
United States, people in the Scandinavian countries began to call for
legal prohibition. Denmark and Sweden had been pioneers in the
liberalization of pornography and were also among the first to discover
the negative consequences. A Swedish television program, broadcast at
the end of 1976, in which a forceful position was taken against school
girls posing in the nude for photographs and the production and sale of
child pornography through the Netherlands and Denmark (who were
experiencing at that time the peak years) set the tone for the new way
of thinking.75 Members of Sweden's parliament pressured for action
against child pornography. A government committee, set up to draft rules
for freedom of media other than the printed press, produced an advisory
report in which prohibition of production and distribution of child
pornography was recommended. Criminalization followed, taking effect on
January 1, 1980. The maximum penalty was set at six months of
imprisonment.76

Denmark followed half a year later. The prohibition concerned commercial distribution only and the punishment was restricted to a
fine. In both countries the legal prohibitions were soundly prepared.
The criminalization was motivated by the need to protect the sexual
integrity of children. It was a question of protection from abuse.

Denmark was the only country where the possible positive effects of
the availability of child pornography played a role in the political
debate; it was suggested that child pornography could serve as a outlet
for tensions that might otherwise lead to actual child abuse. This
argument was proposed by the criminologist B. Kutchinsky. In earlier
research he had shown a connection between the increased availability of
hard pornography and a correlated decrease in reported cases on
voyeurism and sexual crimes against children.77
He also argued that a
prohibition could give rise to a black market. Because of this, Denmark
was the only country in which any significant opposition to the
prohibition of child pornography occurred. The Criminal Law
Committee,78
a permanent advisory organ of the government, after discussing the pros
and cons, went no further than to refrain from speaking out against a
prohibition. The proposal for criminalization was eventually made law
with 126 for, 22 against and 7 abstentions. Left-wing members of parliament
argued that, while they disliked child pornography, they
disliked censorship even more. They remained unconvinced that the law
would protect children.

The discussion in the Netherlands followed a different path.
The
proposal of 1979 to reform the pornography law was based on the 1973
advisory report of the Melai Commission,79 which was still based on
the notion that the distribution of pornography was an offense against
decency. It held that undesired confrontation80 with
"offensive" material (the term was retained) should be
prevented. Children below 16 years should be protected from seeing
pornography, and should even be protected from seeing nakedness on nude
beaches.

However, the last proposal didn't make it into the draft of the law.
There was no mention of child pornography. Also the proposals of the
Ministers De Ruiter and Korthals Altes included no child pornography
clause, despite repeated pressure from the Christian Democrat fraction.
These ministers took the existing prohibition on sex with children as
sufficient to combat the production and distribution of child
pornography. That argument is, however, questionable, since the origin
of much pornography is not known, so that tracking down and prosecuting
the producers is often impossible. It should be remembered that the main
thrust of the proposed reforms was the repeal of old and useless
legislation.

The shift in public attitudes occurred as a result of a number of
developments during the early 1980s. The passage of the proposal for
reform of the pornography law had been languishing, partly under the
influence of the feminist movement. Instead of being sexually liberating,
pornography was portrayed by feminist ideologues as an incitement to
sexual violence and hatred of women. It was said that "pornography
is the theory, rape is the practice" with ideological rather than
empirical force. A shock effect was created as a result of the
aggressive attacks by Joop Wilhelmus on the "Keep off my
Body"81 refuge houses for abused women.
Among other things, he
published the confidential addresses of these centers.82
The result was
a shift of sympathy towards the feminist viewpoint and the politicians
who argued for liberalization of the pornography law, instead of being
seen as fighters for civil rights, became identified with shadowy
figures from a sexist underworld. The Labour Party member of parliament,
Hein Roethof, described the feminist initiatives against pornography as
"the old morality crusading in a new disguise."83

Sharp reactions in the media followed and Roethof lost his position
in the ballot in the next election.84
The feminist criminologist, Yvonne
Quispel, argued in the Journal of Rehabilitation KRI for suspension of
the liberalization of the pornography bill until clarity could be
obtained about the effects of pornography on criminal behavior.85
The
Emancipation Council agreed in response to a request for advice from
Minister of Justice De Ruiter.86
The fact that the existing law had ceased to function as a result
of precedent set by the judiciary and therefore offered complete
freedom was for the most part ignored by the lobbyists. In addition,
their claims that the pornography had become more sadistic, was not
supported by empirical evidence. A 1981 study found that 8.7% of
pornography found in sex shops carried images of violence, while 3.1%
comprised child pornography.87

When Korthals Altes in July, 1984 let it be known that he wanted to
go ahead with the reforms, still without any mention of child pornography, pornography had already been
reconstructed as suspect and potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, while
all the non-religious parties were in accord with the proposal, they had
become conscious of the opposition. The Democrats (D66), with the
Christian Democrats (CDA), came up with a proposal to criminalize the
distribution of pornography which had been made by committing a crime.
This proposal would have automatically included at least some child
pornography.88 The minister argued that this was not necessary since the
distribution of such pornography already fell under "heling,"89
and was thus already punishable.90

A proposal sent in by the NVSH91 and the
COC92 received a great deal
of sympathy in the Lower House. As long as people were not concerned
about the notion of "offensiveness," but about publications
that incited violence, hatred or discrimination against women, then it
was the latter that should be combated.93
The minister considered, and
later accepted, a bill to this effect, which in 1987 was at last presented
to the parliament.94 This reflected the prevailing atmosphere,
wherein the legislature felt compelled to make gestures of goodwill to
the opponents of pornography. In this climate a blanket prohibition on
child pornography was likely to receive wide support.

The eventual criminalization of child pornography and turnaround in
public attitudes had a lot to do with the series of spectacular child
pornography police raids in Amsterdam sex shops. The debate in the Lower
House took place while the memory of the first Amsterdam raids was still
fresh. Korthals Altes added to the proposal a prohibition on child
pornography: Article 240b of the Penal Code made the dissemination and
public display of child pornography a crime. The maximum penalty was set
at three months in jail or a fine of ten thousand guilders.

The manufacture, import, export, transport or holding in stock of
images for distribution or public display, or the distribution or
public display of images, or the information storage device containing
such images, of sexual demeanor, involving a person who has apparently
not yet reached the age of 16 years, shall be punished with a prison
term of at the most three months or a fine of the third category.95

This article was added to the new law at the last moment during
debate in the Lower House. Because of this, caution with the formulation
of wording with respect to the meaning of "sexual demeanor"96 was
insufficient. The written preparation and the advice of the Council of
State97 were missing, and so the proposal was only handled verbally in
the Lower House.98 The members, Rempt-Halmmans de Jongh (liberal), Kosto
(social-democrat) and Groenman (democrat) made attempts to nuance the
formulation. "Innocent" images, namely ordinary photographs of
naked children should not fail under the prohibition. According to Mrs.
Groenman, in a comment that passed unchallenged in the House,
"Thereare, after all, pedophiles and they find naked children
beautiful,"99
a comment that would no doubt have cost her the following election had
she been an American Congressional Representative. The minister later
indicated in his memorandum of reply to the Senate, the intended
connection with child abuse:

The determination is intended to render illegal any expression that
arises as a result of the abuse of a child, including those that are
stored in electronic media.100

For the neutral observer it would have appeared that the nuance in
the approach of Minister and Parliament had set limits to excessive use
of the law. Photos that had not been made as a result of the sexual
abuse of children would not become the object of prohibition. At least,
that is what it looked like.

The Problem of Definitions

If there is a market for child pornography, what are its
characteristics? We begin this analysis with a definition of terms
"child" and "pornography."

To be more specific, we are interested here in the question of what
counts as a child for the purpose of appearance in pornography.101
This
issue raises the problem of comparison between nations, since the ages
of consent for appearance in pornography vary from one country to
another. In Europe this is usually the same as the legal age of consent
for sexual contact: 13 in Scandinavia, 16 in the Netherlands. As long as
the identity of the child remains unknown, the limit in practice is
lower: the child depicted shall only be regarded as a "child"
(Danish law) or be taken as "apparently below the age of 16 years
..." (Dutch law), if the child is clearly below the age of
consent. The American law of 1984 attempted to get around this problem
by increasing the age limit to 18 years. Effectively this would raise
the age of consent "probably not to 18 years, but perhaps to
16."102 The American law that came into force in August
1989 requires that the names and birth dates of all models appearing
in pornographic publications be registered, so that the age can be
checked, and in the absence of registration the age would be taken to be
below 18 years.

The differences in age limits means that material which is considered
child pornography in the United States is not necessarily defined as
child pornography by European law. This was brought home to the American
(governmental) task force on child pornography in January 1985 when they
handed over to their Danish colleagues material which had been seized by
the U.S. Customs as child pornography. They were told that, according to
the Danish law, the material was not illegal.103
Since the amendment of
1989 the difference between American and European definitions has become too great for
official statistics to offer any meaningful comparison. American
statistics on the trade, seizures and prosecutions cannot be regarded as
an indication of the trade in child pornography for current European
understandings.

What is Child Pornography?

The term "child pornography" is misleading. Ostensibly it
is a form of pornography in which one or more children appear. However,
the term is often used to refer to images which would not be regarded
pornographic had the person depicted been an adult. One general
criterion for pornography is its offensiveness to decency or, as in the
U.S. precedent Miller v California, material depicting children which is
"obscene." With the establishment of child pornography
distribution as illegal in the Netherlands it was always clear that the
"offensiveness" was not the criterion. This is by implication
confirmed by the fact that the notion of "offensiveness" is
not taken up in the article 240b of the Penal Code (the article on child
pornography), while in the article 240 on pornography in general it is
retained. Thus a photograph of a naked child does not have to be
offensive to fall under the prohibition. The impression given by the
words "child pornography," that the law only concerns
photographs in which children are being sexually abused or are engaging
in offensive sexual activity, is not correct. Other criteria, however,
need to be satisfied. In the Netherlands, the photograph should depict
"sexual demeanor."

The criteria, both in the United States and in the Netherlands, have
been broadly interpreted. In New York v Ferber the Supreme court
declared the "exceptio artis" not applicable to depictions of
naked children.104 The Dutch courts have not made a determination on
this matter, however, the Minister of Justice declared to the Senate
during the debate over article 240b that prosecution of works having
undeniable value as works of art was excluded.105
The question of what
criterion can be used to judge if a photograph of a child has such
undeniable artistic value has not been answered. Nevertheless, the
jurisprudential expansion of the definitions which has taken place in
the United States has followed a roughly parallel course in the
Netherlands. In essence the illegality became a function of the intended
effect of the image on the viewer; images that the court judges were
intended to arouse the viewer have become illegal.

The American legislature that wrote the first federal child
pornography law in 1977, intended to prohibit images of sexual demeanor
including "nudity, if such is to be depicted for the purpose of
sexual stimulation or gratification of any individual who may see such
depiction."106 The Department of Justice was not pleased with the
formulation, for it would be impossible to decide upon a criterion for
"sexual stimulation or gratification." Nevertheless
Stanley107 shows that the judiciary has used the same
criterion which was rejected by the Justice Department in the cases
United States v Dost108 and United States
v Wiegand.109 The American
Federal Law, therefore, has been stretched and the result has been
sentencing on the basis of the opinion of a judge that the maker
intended the work to be sexually stimulating. Current American practice
is quite unrestrained in the prevailing climate and simple naked
photographs of children are no longer exempt from prosecution.

Developments in the Netherlands are parallel.
The original
circumspection in the formulation of the law has not been respected by
the judiciary. This is the result of the decisions of the Supreme court
in the case of the Ministry of Justice v Donald Mader.110
The Supreme
Court accepted "an image of a youthful person in such a pose that
thereby apparently the stimulation of the sexual arousal was
intended" as satisfying the criterion of "sexual
demeanor."111 This definition had been proposed by the De Wit child
pornography work group which had been established by the minister of
Justice in 1985.112 The definition finds a counterpart in the American
jurisprudence in the cases Dost and Wiegand. In both the U.S. and the
Netherlands, the judiciary gave their own interpretation of the law and
sought a criterion for the prohibition of child pornography in the moral
effect on the public and the consumers, namely, the arousal value of the
images.

Pornography here concerns photographs and films.
In the Netherlands,
drawings also fall under the prohibition "because serious
consideration may be given to the possibility that the drawings are not
made directly from the imagination."113
There has been no
prohibition on pornographic text in the Netherlands since the change of
the law in 1986; including text about sex with and among children.
In
the U.S. at a federal level there is no specific prohibition on drawings
and text, although they would be prohibited if they satisfied the
criterion for "obscenity" formulated in the Miller v California decision.

It is obvious that the laws and jurisprudence offer little ground for
an objective analysis of the trade in child pornography. Not only is it
difficult to compare the facts from one country to another because of
varying definitions, but the legislature and judiciary have, in the
course of the years, stretched the definitions. This has reached a point
where, in principle at least, all naked photographs, including the
photographs which one is likely to come across in art galleries and
family albums, fall under the prohibitions. Without a consistent and
specific definition, any attempt to measure the volume of the trade is a
hopeless undertaking. It would be more useful to use the description
given by Korthals Altes during the verbal debate over article 240b in the
Lower House, which seems to have been forgotten since then:

Mrs. Rempt (VVD; Liberal party) has enquired about the notion of'
sexual demeanor. She is concerned that this would be too loosely
interpreted. I am assuming a reasonable application of the law by the
judiciary. I believe it is sufficiently clear that this is not about innocent behaviour.
One
must realize that it concerns material that is sold in sex shops. It seems
to me not unlikely that this also includes much innocent material.
In
any case it is certainly not the intention of this formulation.114

As a result, material which is for sale in sex shops can be viewed as
(commercial) child pornography, despite the fact that much of this
material is, indeed, quite innocent. For example the Danish magazine
Boy (published by COQ in Holbaek), of which dozens of issues appeared,
contained overwhelmingly ordinary naked photographs, often taken
outdoors in a nudist setting.

Two distinct categories of claims are made about the extent of the
trade in the United States  the claims not based on research and others
which are. The first category includes claims that the trade was valued
at millions and even billions of dollars. The second category includes
the Senate Commission under William V. Roth, which investigated the
trade and came to the conclusion that the most generous estimate of the
value of annual import to the U.S. was $5 million. The commercial child
pornography which had been seized in the U.S. did not even reach the
neighbourhood of $5 million, according to the Commission.115
The Roth
Commission also determined that there was no evidence for the existence
of large underground networks of commercial traders, despite the claims
regularly made in the media and some official documents. Child
pornography was made almost exclusively for private use by the makers:

The fact is that the overwhelming majority of child pornography seized in arrests made in the United States has not been produced or
distributed for profit.116

Estimates of the extent of the total pornography trade in the U.S.
range from $1.5 billion to $8 billion per year.117
The high estimates
come from Robert Showers, head of the National Obscenity Enforcement
Unit of the American Ministry of Justice, established as a result of the
Meese report. The unit had the tendency to estimate the pornography
problem as being much greater than it is. The actual turnover of the
retail trade, including much soft pornography, is therefore more likely
to lie closer to the lower figure.118
Roth's most generous estimate
implied that the total import of child pornography to the United States
was at the most 0.33% of the total American pornography trade.

That is less than the Work group on child pornography of the Dutch
Ministry of Justice had suggested. This group, chaired by the Amsterdam
Officer of Justice (public prosecutor) Mr. L. De Wit, had been
established with a mandate to determine the volume and direction of the trade in child pornography in the Netherlands as a response to
the allegations on Dutch involvement made by the U.S. administration.
Before legal prosecution occurred in the Netherlands, child pornography,
according to the work group, was said to be 1% of the total turnover of
all pornography.119

If we assume that the pornography market in the Netherlands (which in
the 1970s had a population of 14 million) was the same as the U.S.
market per capita then we should have had an annual turnover of between
100 and 500 million dollars; 1% being 1 to 5 million dollars. If a large
part, say one quarter, had been sold to Americans, then the export from
the Netherlands to the United States would have been between 0.25 and
125 million dollars. The Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden were, according
to sources cited by the Roth Commission,120
jointly responsible for 85%
of the export to the U.S. The Netherlands was said to be responsible for
70% of the total according to the De Wit work group,121 which implies a
total export from the Netherlands to the U.S. of 0.42 to 2.2 million
dollars. These estimates suggest that the 5 million dollar claim of the
Roth Commission should be considered exaggerated. Further, it must be
reiterated that the American definitions are generally much broader than
the European.

How realistic is the estimate of 1%? It must be kept in mind that the
statistic applies to the first half of the 1980s, by which time the sale
of child pornography had been seriously inhibited by legal prohibitions
in many countries. For an estimate of the turnover in earlier years we
have made use of an (unpublished) report of Professor E. Braches,122
based on a systematic registration and dating of photograph magazines
and booklets which were available in Europe between the 1950s up until
1984. Individual slides and photographs were not significant elements in
the trade. Films were not registered by Braches. He claims that his
count of European material is more or less complete, while his count of
American material has an incidental character. Braches argues that the
American production was less than the European (although European
publications typically included photographs made in America), which
agrees with the ILIC report of 1980. His inclusion of some American
material, however, enabled him to show that child pornography became
available in the United States before Europe. The study cannot be used
as a measure of how much material was available in the U.S.A.

Braches' study shows that production of child pornography is largely
a phenomenon of the past. About 1980 the production almost completely
came to an end. Our count, which includes the supplementary material
from the years after 1984 up to and including 1990 which was gathered by
us, is as follows: 508 magazines contained exclusively photographs of
boys and 288 magazines contained almost exclusively photographs of girls.
Since the girl magazines are heterosexual in nature they
sometimes contain boys engaged sexually with the girls, but are counted
as girl magazines since the focus of attention is on the girls.123
Between
1970 and 1980 there appeared over the entire world an average of nearly
five new publications per month. That is less than 2% of the 264 monthly
publications that Densen-Gerber claims to have counted.

The quantity of each issue published, the primary
circulation,124 is
difficult to assess, since no statistics are available except those of
the producers, which we have accepted as a good guide in view of the fact
that they do not differ significantly from the claims made by the
principal institutional opponents of child pornography. According to
Joop Wilhelmus, who published the Lolita series, 25,000 copies of each
issue were printed at the high point which eventually sank to 5,000.125
The Danish trader, Willy Strauss, said that his first magazine
sold 19,000 copies within one week.126
We can assume that the market for
girl magazines was greater than for boy magazines since we would expect
more heterosexual then homosexual buyers. According to Braches this is
also evident from the greater production regularity and lower price127
of girl magazines.128 It seems unlikely, therefore, that the boy
magazines reached the same circulation. According to the Amsterdam
publisher of Paedo Alert News, which contained English language stories
of sex with boys, political information on pedophilia worldwide, and
some nonpornographic illustrations of clothed boys, the primary
circulation of his magazine worldwide never amounted to more than 2,500
per edition.129

Using Braches' count, the European production can be assessed as
somewhat over 700 issues, leaving the American and possible Asian
production out of the picture. The highest available indication of world
production comes from Stanley, in connection with a content analysis
which he was plarning:130 1,065 issues, including 540 issues in which at
least one child was depicted engaged in sexual activity.131
If we
estimate the primary circulation of each issue at 10,000, which is
probably too high for the boy magazines, and the price per magazine132
at $10, then we arrive at a total turnover of $106 million. The sale of
films was much less in number, but significantly more expensive per
unit. If we assume that the monetary turnover was about the same for
films and magazines, then we come to a total world turnover of $212
million. Measured over the 14 years in which significant production
occurred, this comes to $15 million per year.

This is exactly 1% of the $1.5 billion that is a likely figure for
annual retail turnover for the United States. The $1.5 billion however,
is the turnover for the middle of the 1980s. In the 1970s, when most child pornography was manufactured,
the total pornography turnover must have been less. On the other hand,
this figure is based on the American market only, so that the world
market must have been larger. In the final analysis, the claim that 1%
of all pornography is comprised of child pornography seems a reasonable
estimate.

These figures give no more than an impression of the order of
magnitude. In view of the number of assumptions that have been made they
should not be seen as a precise estimate. The assumptions with respect
to price and primary circulation and the role that films played in the
total are generous, so it is very unlikely that the actual turnover
could have been much larger.

The Dutch Share of the Market

Because of the popularity of Lolita, the Dutch share of the world
market may have been relatively large. If the average primary
circulation of all 192 issues is estimated at about 15,000, then this
series alone constituted a quarter of the total.

At the sittings of the Roth commission of November 29 and 30, 1984
the Netherlands and Denmark were accused of responsibility for 85% of
the child pornography import to the U.S.A. According to the De Wit
report,133 between April 1, 1984 and April 1, 1985 the American customs
seized 2,069 shipments of child pornography; half of the total
confiscated pornography. A maximum of 70% could have come from the
Netherlands. How reliable are these facts? Stanley,134 on the basis of
his count taken from the New York135 Customs' lists of seized pornography
came to an estimate of 25 pieces of child pornography per year. As we
have already seen, the U.S. definition of pornography is broader than the
European.

Dutch officials were also given confiscated material:
85 packets from the Netherlands. The Roth commission later admitted:

Dutch officials determined that only 42 had return addresses, 16
were traced to locations outside the Netherlands and 21 proved to be
either false or untraceable. Only five addresses appeared to be correct,
and they were of firms in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Dordrecht.136

The De Wit work group, who mentions eight rather than five correct
addresses, conducted police investigations.137
This "yielded no
worthwhile results," according to the work group, thereby
suggesting that the addresses did not lead to child pornography
exporters. It is remarkable to note that the information received from
the American government by the Dutch government has seldom or never led
to any criminal prosecution. In 1986, when the new article 240b was in
force, and the number of seizures of "Dutch child pornography"
handed to the Dutch Department of Justice by the American customs
authorities was reported to be 111, one would have expected at least
some prosecutions had the material actually been child pornography.

The American "facts" also explain how the
Amsterdam police spokesman Wilting could think that half the pornography trade concerned child pornography.
He must have received this from the American customs. Indeed, William Von Raab, the Commissioner of
Customs, stated to the Roth commission that "of the 4,266 pornography seizures made in the fiscal year 1984, approximately
one-half involved the exploitation of children."138
This half was
the above mentioned 2,069. Apart from the reliability of the figures and
the differences in definition, the proportion of seizures obviously does
not reflect the proportion of production that constitutes child
pornography.

The relatively small size of the market is also apparent from the
number of convictions. In the United States, between 1978 and 1984, when
prohibition only applied to commercial exchange, 69 persons were accused
and 64 sentenced on the basis of various federal child pornography laws.139
In 1984, besides trading, the premeditated receipt of child
pornography became illegal, irrespective of the commercial
element. There
were 164 convictions over the following two years, however, these were
for the most part the result of entrapment operations by American
government agencies. Operations such as "Looking Glass" and
"Borderline" offered child pornography in order to arrest and
bring to trial unsuspecting buyers, some of whom may not have known what
they were buying, or would never have bought any child pornography if it
had not been offered to them.140
In Denmark there were two convictions
between 1980 and 1985.141

In the Netherlands, after the prohibition to the end of 1988, there
were seven convictions. Table 1 shows that directly after the
introduction of the child pornography law on May 21, 1986, the number of
pornography cases rose briefly. The rise may have been the result of the
pressure on the police from the Ministry of Justice to act forcefully
against child pornography.142
Convictions, however, did not result. Probably many of the cases were difficult to prove, or the police were
on the wrong track, which is suggested by the number of investigations
that were closed without conclusive evidence being found.143
After 1987,
the Justice Department gave less priority to child pornography cases,
which may have been the result of the fact that hardly any
investigations got as far as the courts.

After 1984 the magazines and films virtually disappeared from sight.
After that date the only known Dutch publications were the last seven
issues of the David146 series which ran from 1983 to 1987.
In
particular, after 1987 another category of magazines and video films has
made a comeback: these do not show sexual activity, but rather photos
and films in a nude setting or only one child posing. This concerns
German productions in general. Our analysis is made more difficult as a result of this phenomenon: it is
doubtful whether the
photos and films involved could reasonably be considered child
pornography and, in any case, this is not the kind of material that
arouses great interest among law enforcers.147

In Germany the news and entertainment magazines Jimmy and Philius are
produced, as are the photo magazines B-Engel, Andy and Boys Art
Magazine. The latter two first appeared in 1989; until the end of 1990
seven issues were published of each. B-Engel dates from 1987; between
that year and 1990 14 issues came out. Philius and Jimmy contain mainly
news, book and film reviews, and short stories, and are illustrated with
some pictures of naked boys, though no sexual activity is shown.

It is questionable whether the dissemination of these magazines is
prosecutable. We presume that this is not the case: the publisher,
Medium Verlagsgesellschaft in Berlin mentions its address, telephone and
bank account numbers in the magazines, rather than keeping them secret,
and it also uses the official International Standard Serial Number
(ISSN) for its publications. Moreover, many books which contain photos
of a similar nature are offered and sold freely, both in Germany and the
Netherlands.

We have not included these books into our count. The reason is that
the magazines are largely traded through sex shops, whereas we have
encountered the books only in regular book shops. Since the magazines
show only marginally or non-sexually explicit pictures, our definition of "child pornography" is indeed very wide.
The inclusion of
the German productions in our tallies (see Appendix
A) may suggest that
child pornography trade is re-emerging in Europe. However, in view of the
marginally-sexual nature of the material and its relative scarcity, this
conclusion would be exaggerated and premature. Moreover, a return to the
heyday of the 1970s is very unlikely because of the prohibitions that
have since been introduced in many countries.

In Jimmy, nude pictures of young boys are offered for sale.
These do not
show sexual activity either, although in some of them the boys do have
an erection. Furthermore, another German publisher sells videotapes.
From
the brochure it appears that these do not show sexual activity either,
at least not with persons who are apparently under 16 years of age.
Exceptions are a series of eight Japanese tapes (the age of consent in
Japan is reportedly 13 years) and some other tapes that have been
recorded in South-East Asia. However, the age of the Asian boys is easily
underestimated by Europeans.

Police investigations of pornography businesses sometimes discover
small stocks of old leftover material being sold from under the counter.
Apart from that, there is the informal swap circuit, but no reliable
estimate of the extent is possible except to note that the volume
"traded" in this manner must be small. Despite the policy of
decisive police intervention in cases of suspected sex with children the
number of cases where pornography has been discovered and sold remains
incidental. One case concerned four Englishmen operating in
Amsterdam.148 In 1990 a Dutchman
was arrested for mailing videotapes to the United States for $200 to
$300 each. The tapes, as could have been predicted, had been intercepted
by the U.S. Customs.149 He got a suspended sentence of three months and a
fine of 3,500 guilders (about $l,700).150
The identities of the children
were never established, and the opinion of a pediatrician was used as
evidence that the models were below age 16.

In any case, the major channels for retail trade of child
pornography, the pornography shops, were as good as closed by the middle
of the 1980s. After the published magazines vanished the amateur
photographer, Fred V., who had been one of the suppliers during the peak
years of the industry, continued to sell photographs to a small circle
of individual contacts after the disappearance of commercial channels.
In 1988 he was arrested and sentenced, but the charges were for the
sexual activity ("fornication") arising from the making of the
photographs and films, not for the dissemination thereof. A second case
against him for trading in child pornography never eventuated, despite
attempts over two years by the Public Ministry of Justice. The
photographs and films which were implicated in the criminal proceedings
against him were apparently not traded on any significant scale.

It is clear that the new laws and the actions of the Justice
Department have essentially eliminated the trade in child pornography.
Indeed, the new prohibitions had been immediately effective in every
country where they had been enacted. The sales were of such
insignificant volume for the pornography dealers that the advantage of
trading was greatly outweighed by the disadvantage of the increased
risks. That is confirmed by the absence of criminal prosecutions, despite the
efforts of the police and the Justice Department. The opinion of the
Officer of Justice in Utrecht, that three months' jail was such an
insufficient disincentive that the "commercial lads waltz whistling
into the jail"151 seems not to be based on an adequate
understanding of the facts.

According to the De Wit work group, child pornography is both made by
individuals and published commercially. In recent years, according to De
Wit, the commercial material is no longer available.152
That is not
entirely true as we shall see. The privately made material may be
retained by the individual photographer for personal use only, or may
join the informal "swap" circuit, or it may be sold to
commercial producers. The work group suggested that the American claims
that 70% of all commercial material comes initially from private sources
was correct. Typical of this material is the generally poor quality, and
usually black and white photographs. The photographs were
apparently not
made with publication in mind. One may also conclude that a small price was paid for the
photographs:153 Joop
Wilhelmus offered a gift magazine in exchange for each photograph
received from his readers, as became evident from his correspondence with
the U.S. undercover agent, Toby Tyler.154
In the magazines Wilhelmus also
offered $350 for the opportunity to take the photographs himself.155

An example of commercial production is reported in the final report
of the Roth Commission.156 The British citizen, Eric Cross, invited two
Florida girls of 10 and 11 for a holiday excursion with the knowledge of
the parents. In a hotel he made hundreds of naked photographs of them,
returned them to their parents, and left for Amsterdam with the exposed
films. Some of the photographs were intercepted in a photolab in
Amsterdam and handed over to the police. Cross was arrested, found to be
wanted in England, and was handed over to the British authorities.
He
was eventually brought to Florida where he was sentenced to 28 years and
after an escape and rearrest, to another 95 years. Apparently not all
the photographs were seized, and a number of them were published in
three booklets titled Linda and Patty, which according to the title page
was produced by Delphi Press in Copenhagen.

In the case of Cross, the commercial aim was clearly premeditated.
This is not so with the majority of the material found in commercial
publications. Examples of leakage of private photographs into the
commercial trade are easy to find. In the Netherlands between 1983 and
1987, the series which appeared under the title David, contained
photographs which came from the collection of a private individual who,
apparently, never intended them for publication.157
After his death the
photographs fell into the hands of a relative who turned them to profit.

Almost all other magazines consisted of photographs sent in by
individuals. In order to avoid criminal proceedings for indecent assault
or sexual abuse of children, some publishers used only photographs made
in other countries. The same applies to films. Many films were produced
by the firm COQ in Holbaek in Denmark, under the title Golden
Boys. The
ambiance (clothing, landscape, housing style) of various films we saw
suggests that these were made in the United States, possibly in the
West.

One of the most active photographers of the naked child in the
Netherlands was Fred V.,158 who worked under the name of Akki.
In
September of 1988 he was arrested when a client of his attempted to
bring photographs into the United Kingdom. The arrest of three Dutchmen,
friends of Fred V., followed: Chris, Anton, and Ferdinand.159
Ferdinand
and Anton had often visited Fred in the company of their young boy
friends. This case, which would be described as a child sex ring
operation by Kenneth Lanning,160 is fairly typical of situations that
lead to pornographic photography of children and, in the past, the
leakage of the photographs into the commercial circuit.

The story of this affair is described below (Child Sex Ring
Discovered), an analysis of the police dossier is set out in Appendix
D, and interviews with three of the boys in Appendix
E. The media images of very small children, kidnapped, drugged,
violently sexually abused, often alleged to have been subjected to
bizarre perverse abuse before being murdered and buried in deserted
places,161 are as exaggerated as the claims of millions of children and
billions of dollars. For example, according to Kenneth Herrmann of DCI:
"The hundreds of millions of children involved in this broad problem
all
suffer irreparable damage" (our emphasis).162
While we do not in
any way condone the exploitation of the boys in this case, the facts
which emerge from our investigation into the way in which the children
themselves experienced their involvement provide a more balanced picture
of reality than popular views about child pornographers and their
victims suggest.

Here we are concerned with the modus operandi of Fred V.
Apart from
the photographs he made for the pornography trade, he also worked for
ordinary youth magazines which gave him a degree of legitimacy and easy
access to events where many children participated. The international
youth soccer tournament in Oslo, the Norway Cup, was one of his regular
assignments. Here he had access to the changing rooms to take
photographs. However, at these events he produced no hard pornography.
He dealt commercially in his non-hard core work. During the 1970s he
earned money from these activities, but donated it to charities, among
others, Mother Theresa and third-world children.163
While he cannot be
accused of large scale commercial production of child pornography, he is
certainly guilty of abusing the trust of many boys and their parents.
Fred V. knew how to get on with boys, and was often away on camping
trips with groups of boys, with the knowledge of their parents.

The parents did not suspect that his caravan (travel trailer) served
as a mobile pornography studio. Fred V. encouraged the boys to play sex
games with each other, which he then filmed and photographed "as
part of the fun." Some of this material was hard core, showing the
boys engaged in a variety of activities. The boys were told that the
photographs were exclusively for Fred V.'s own use and would not be
disseminated. Later one of the boys said that he was disgusted by what
he had been doing, and several others expressed regrets, although it is
not clear how much these statements, which were made to the police, had
to do with the discovery of the activities and the way in which the boys
were interrogated.

The photographs and films show the boys entering vigorously and with
pleasure in the sex games.164
In this case, all three boys we interviewed
felt themselves more abused by the police than by Fred V., whom they
nevertheless saw as someone who had broken his word and exploited their
trust.165 The boys trusted Fred, as did Ferdinand and Anton.
Ferdinand
and Anton knew that photographs were being made, however, they had
nothing to do with the distribution of pornography. Nevertheless, they
must have known about Fred V.'s publications under the name of Akki, and
were at least a little naive not to think that he might be exploiting
their trust. In any case, both they (jail sentences) and their boy friends (frightening police
interrogations) have suffered for these follies. Fred V. obtained no
sympathy from the boys whom he had duped.

The result of police and judicial activity was that the supply of new
photographs vanished. It cannot be known how much commercial production
might have continued to take place had the supply of new material been
maintained. The last issues of Lolita contained mainly reprints
of old
material and urgent pleas for the readers to send in new photographs.
There was no reply and this was apparently one of the last straws to
break the back of the commercial industry.

The only way to estimate the number of children who have been
involved in the production of child pornography is by counting the faces
which appear in the magazines and films. There are several problems,
including the possibility that the same children may be difficult to
recognize from one publication to the next due to such factors as age
change between photo sessions, differences in the setting, absence of
the face or other recognizable characteristics,166 and so on, so that
double counting is likely to have occurred.167

In Appendix B is the result of our
counting which came to an average
of 11.1 new children per magazine. On the basis of the estimate of 1,065
published magazines, this implies almost 12,000 children have been
associated with child pornography in some way or other. The films have
not been counted, however, the number of children appearing in the films
is much smaller than in the magazines, usually no more than two per
film, and furthermore the film actors are often depicted in the
magazines.168

The figure of 12,000 is likely to be too high, first because of the
double counting. Also, the sample we used for our analysis, unlike the
complete set used by Braches, did not contain pirate publications,
although these were also made and of course do not represent any new
children. Furthermore, we counted all the children who appeared in the
magazines, including children in fully clothed portrait photographs who
may not have appeared in any naked or pornographic scenes. Moreover, of
Stanley's 1,065 magazines, only 540 contained photographs in which
sexual events were taking place. The balance contained "at least
one depiction of a minor engaged in lewd or lascivious 'exhibition of
the genitals'." If we multiply 11.1 by 540, a likely estimate of
the children involved in sexually explicit pornography, to which the
remaining magazines add only incidentally, we arrive at about 6,000.
Furthermore, since many of the children are depicted in more than one
magazine, often in more than one series, the number of new children
discovered tended to decrease as we progressed through the material at
hand. Therefore, our figure of 11.1 should not be extrapolated to all
magazines.

Stanley169 estimated 5,000 as the minimum number of
children. In view
of our counting, an estimate of 10,000 as a maximum seems not
unreasonable. We can say, therefore, that the number of children involved
must lie between 5,000 and 10,000. This number comes nowhere near the
estimates of Robin Lloyd (300,000 boys) and Densen-Gerber (1.2 million),
for the United States alone. Nevertheless, 10,000 children is an
impressive figure. The child pornography problem may have been crassly
overestimated by some, but it is also not possible to dismiss it as
negligible.

The statistics in Appendix A make it clear that the
Netherlands was
not simply a trading land in the past, as the De Wit report asserted.
The Netherlands was, alongside the United States, Great Britain,
Germany, Denmark and Sweden also a producer and, as we see in Lolita,
responsible for some of the hardest material. Important people in this
industry were Joop Wilhelmus and Fred V., both Dutchmen.

Child pornography has been called the "epitome of hard core
pornography."170 There may be some justification for some of these
sentiments, especially when we consider the manner in which some
children have been exploited for the production of the pornography, but
these cries of indignation do not tell us what the pornography actually
contains. Statements made by the police suggest that the pornography
must be terrible. According to the Officer of Justice R.A.M.
Behling,
making an inventory of the pornography in the V. case was not fun:
"It was horrifying. Every hour the officers had to stop work and
let another take over."171

We spent many days on end making our content analysis without the
need to stop every hour. Nevertheless, in view of the obvious abuse
depicted in some of the magazines, we can identify with the claims of
some officers. The impression that one forms from looking through large
amounts of child pornography are, of course, highly subjective. By far
the majority of the material was neutral, except perhaps for people who
might be offended by the fact of nakedness. While the pictures of
laughing children posing naked on beaches are quickly forgotten, the
anger that arises from seeing some photographs of a small girl forced to
suck a large phallus and to submit to penetration with a coke bottle, or
the series depicting the anal rape of a teenage boy, leave one disturbed
and angry for a long time.

Our content analysis is an attempt to objectively establish the
hardness of child pornography. We have used a hardness scale as follows:

0.

Clothed or portrait.

1.

Naked, but not posed. Many of these were nudist-type photographs.
The children in these photographs gave no sign of being aware of the camera
and were usually depicted engaged in other activities such as swimming or
playing ping pong, etc.

2.

Naked and posing. The children here were looking at the camera or
had adopted a self conscious pose.

3.

Naked with genital contact or contact with another body.
These
included photographs where a hand was in contact with the genitals, and
photographs showing naked children hugging or kissing each other.

4.

Oral contact with sex organs.

5.

Penetration, either anal or Vaginal.

6.

Bizarre. This last category contained material with a
sadomasochistic character, urine sex, and photographs on which objects
were introduced into the body orifices.

Appendix C contains a more detailed breakdown of our results.
Our
main conclusions are given in Table 2, in which the distribution of the
photographs over the seven categories are given. The categories 1,2 and
3, in which no sexual activity can be seen, comprise 62% of photographs.
With boys, this is 68%, and with girls it is 55%. The hard pornography,
being categories 4,5 and 6, incorporates 18%, with 9% for boys and 26%
for girls.

Appendix C shows the statistical comparisons for boy versus girl
magazines, the land of origin, and the comparison of photographs where
one child appeared to photographs showing two or more children, and to
photographs in which adults also appeared.

The pornography in the girl magazines was found to be significantly
harder than in boy magazines.172
Denmark and the Netherlands received significantly higher scores with respect
to hardness, and Germany scored by far the lowest. In the German material
we analyzed, almost none of the photographs contained explicit sexual
activity.

Photographs containing two or more children were significantly harder
than photographs depicting only one child. More interesting is the
finding that photographs with adults, 22% of the total, were
significantly harder than photographs with two or more children. This was
particularly marked with girls.

We attempted to judge how the children experienced the photography
sessions by analyzing their expressions. There were difficulties with
this exercise. First, the interpretation of facial expression is
subjective. We found it difficult to tie the scoring to objective
criteria.173 Some of the photographs did not show faces, many of which
fell into category 6. We attempted to solve this problem by counting
only those photographs in which the expressions were unambiguously
happy, and those that showed unequivocal pain or fear. As a result 81%
of the photographs remained unscored. Of the remainder, 18% were
characterized by obvious pleasure and laughter, while 1% showed negative
reactions. We conclude that the comments of the police spokesman
Wilting, "The horror radiates from their faces," are a rather
one-sided interpretation. Further conclusions we believe, cannot be
drawn.

Table 2- Division of Photographs in the Sample

Boys

Girls

Total

0. Clothed

800(17.3%)

85 (1.5%)

885 (8.5%)

1. Naked

1120(24.2%)

917 (16.2%)

2037(19.6%)

2. Posed

1249(27.2%)

2155 (37.5%)

3404(32.8%)

3. Contact

1030(22.2%)

1096(19.1%)

2126 (20.5%)

4. Oral

218 (4.7%)

490(8.5%)

708 (6.8%)

5. Genital

192(4.1%)

922(16.1%)

1114(10.7%)

6. Bizarre

21(0.5%)

75 (1.3%)

96(0.9%)

Total

4630(100%)

5740(100%)

10370(100%)

Snuff Films

Our content analysis did not include film and video material,
nevertheless, we are able to draw some conclusions about films and
videos. The film material, usually super eight, generally dates from the
1960s and 70s and comes largely from the U.S.A., though some films were
made in Europe. The video material is more recent, is usually of very
poor quality, and is circulated through informal channels. One of the
videos, typical of this genre, showed candid scenes taken in a boys'
changing room at a sauna. It was rather innocent material, perhaps
pathetic but certainly not violent or dangerous. Several videos show
bored youths masturbating for the camera while having difficulty
sustaining their own arousal. One Japanese video showed anal intercourse
with a very young boy who was clearly not enjoying the experience.
Other
videos, most often made in private homes, tend to be similar to the
films of previous decades. The most striking unifying feature is the poor
quality.

Frames from the films were widely pirated for reproduction in printed
material so that this material has been indirectly included in our
content analysis. In almost all the films we have seen, the children
were either indifferent or were laughing and entering into the activity
with gusto. We have not seen any films in which children are subject to
brutal or sadistic rape, although some of the photographs we analyzed
suggested that this might have occurred. We found no evidence of
"snuff films." No one we spoke to had ever seen one or knew
where to get one. Some of the collectors we spoke to have large
collections containing material from all over the world and informal
connections with many other collectors. We believe that if snuff films
had ever been made we would have been able to trace them. No snuff films
have been discovered by police anywhere in the world, or reported in any
criminological or sexological literature that we have been able to
discover. It is our conclusion that they do not exist.

In September 1988 it seemed as if the American allegations against the Netherlands must have been at least partly true.
"Pornography
Airlift prime evidence for role of Dutchmen," announced one
headline on De Telegraaf, the largest Dutch dally.174
A certain triumphant
sensationalism rang through the article:

The discovery of a true life
air lift of young London lads who, under
the leadership of their school master Brother Leonard Jack J., made their
way to the Netherlands to work as child pornography models, has yielded
the first unequivocal evidence that the Netherlands has played a key
role in the international distribution of child pornography, just as the
Americans have been saying all along. The Minister of Justice Mr.
F. Korthals Altes has always denied that our country ever played an
important role in the production and distribution of child pornography.
His assertion has now had the rug pulled out from under it according to Scotland Yard.
The Utrecht Morals Police175 and also Scotland Yard's inspector Baker were painfully
embarrassed to discover that the case, which they had carefully kept out
of the publicity until now, had been discovered by our paper.176

The article did not explain how the brother was able to bring the
children, with the knowledge of the parents, to the Netherlands. It
remained "a total mystery," according to the headmaster of the
school where Brother Leonard Jack J. was employed. The solution to the
mystery is simple; the story was not true. No boys had been shuttled
backwards and forwards, however, Brother J. had accepted some photographs
from Fred V. while visiting the Netherlands. His suitcase was
accidentally off-loaded at the wrong airport and so fell into the hands
of Customs officials. Following his arrest in England, the Dutch police
were informed. The police in the Netherlands were taking their time, in
an effort to uncover the extent of the pornography activities of Fred
V., a known figure to them.

The response of the police in the Netherlands was not fast enough for
Scotland Yard, so that the British police leaked the story to the media.
When De Telegraaf let the Utrecht police know that the story would break
on the following Saturday, there was no time to build up a case in the
quiet.177 On Friday evening Fred V. was arrested and his friend Chris the
following morning. The other two, Ferdinand and Anton were arrested
early the following week.178

The case is interesting because of the large range of sexual
relationships and contacts between men and boys, varying from serious
abuse to genuine love relationships. It gives an insight into the
complexity of man-boy sexual relationships, the context in which almost
all boy child pornography is made.179
It also makes it clear how things
can go amiss when these kinds of sexual contacts are photographed and
filmed. It raises questions about the methods employed by the police who
were under pressure to get results. Both because of domestic Ministerial
directives to act decisively and because of the international spotlight
on the case, the police clearly lost sight of the ultimate purpose of
the laws which they were enforcing. The interests of the children who
had been involved were forgotten and they became pawns in the effort to
get the case wrapped up.

In Appendix D we analyze the police dossier for the case against
Fred, Ferdinand and Anton. Ferdinand and Anton had never been involved
in the manufacture or the distribution of pornography, which is apparent
from the statements contained in the police dossier.180
Furthermore, the
prosecution of these men did not occur in the interests of all the boys
involved, indeed, the opposite was the case. Chris was apparently not
involved at all, and eventually no charges against him were brought.

The dossier shows that the Justice Department did not doubt for a
moment the necessity of all the prosecutions despite the fact that not
one of the boys made a negative statement about Anton and Ferdinand.
This was especially true of Johnny, Ferdinand's youngest friend, who was
deeply distressed by the arrest of his adult friend. The men were
arrested because the police and Justice Department felt they could book
a great success in rolling up a child pornography network. Officer of
Justice Mr. R.A.M. Behling saw "for the first time a chance to lay
bare a distribution center of child pornography,"181 and "The
distribution territory, the volume, the form, the frequency and the aim;
I want to know lots more."182

Eventually, however, the cases against Fred, Ferdinand and Anton were
based entirely on the sexual contacts with a number of boys. A case
against Fred for distribution of pornography was to be announced "as
soon as more information could be gathered." However, the
distribution of child sex photographs of any significance has not been
established. After two years the Ministry of Justice had to close the
investigation. Apparently, at most Fred had sold nude photographs to
legitimate magazines, and the pornography which he had made was
distributed by hand to small numbers of personal friends. No pornography
prosecutions resulted.

The use of the media by the police to spread distorted and alarming
stories can also be criticized. It was claimed that the children had
declared they were "revolted" by what had happened.183
The
term had been used once only by one of the children. The positive
statements of most of the children were not mentioned to the
media. In
reality the picture is more complex and varied. Of the statements
summarized in Appendix D, two are positive, four, including the girls,
are neutral, and seven are slightly to very negative. With respect to
Anton, only the statements of three boys are available, neither positive
nor negative. With respect to Ferdinand, four boys made statements; of
these two (Johnny and Stephan) made extremely positive statements.
A
third (Peter) was rather neutral. The fourth statement was made by a
10-year-old, whose stories were obviously the product of a rich fantasy
and not corroborated by any other facts or statements, as also the
police had to agree. Johnny declared at the end of his statement of the
first interrogation:

Summing it up, I can say that I have never done anything sexual
under duress. Everything I did, I did because I liked it. I have had a
very good relationship with Ferdinand, and I still have. I also don't
want to end the relationship now.184

The children are taken into an environment with all kinds of
treats, candy, trips, stories, read to them.185
Even if they think that
it is all very nice, it still isn't. They are seduced, easy
prey. Even
if they instinctively don't want to go on, then they have to assert that
against an adult to whom they look up. If the children go on then I
see that as forced. In such cases Judges assume correctly that there
has been damage done. This is totally different from sex games for
discovery. Children do that of their own free will.186

This is an example of "heads I win, tails you lose"
thinking: if the boys say they have been abused then they have, and if they say that they have not, then they still have been.
Behling ignores the fact that boys are sexually excitable and that sex
might be a positive experience for some of them. With Behling's logic,
all disagreements are won in advance. Whether he is right is another
point.

In our opinion, the boys should be the ones to decide that, in
particular now that have become adults. We point out that Johnny and
Ferdinand's other friends are no longer minors. Their friendship with
Ferdinand continues to this day undiminished, as is their appreciation
for what they experienced with him during their adolescent years. One of
us visited four times to conduct interviews with Ferdinand for this
article. On every occasion one or more of the boys dropped by,
unannounced, on several occasions with their girl friend in arm. Indeed,
it was because of the sustained good relationships between Ferdinand and
the boys that it became possible to obtain the interviews. (Transcripts of the three interviews are presented in
Appendix E.)

The suggestion that protection of children played any role in the
actions of the police and the Justice Department in this case is
difficult to accept. Johnny had to submit to four interrogations; the
first time he was in tears and so upset that the interrogation could not
proceed.187 The application of force, such as threatening to pick him up
at school, and the threat to bring in the court-commissioner to approve
special methods, make it dear that the police were only interested in
scoring another conviction. The officer concerned, Bert Goselink,
revealed his inability to identify with the boys or to learn anything
from this case when he said later in an interview:

When they got older and some pubic hair appears they are no longer
attractive (to the pedophile). Then the pedophiles callously drop
them; just abandon them. That leads to all kinds of psychological
problems, especially later when they start dating.188

These are astonishing comments from a man who has dedicated himself
to breaking up such relationships. If such a relationship is to be
condemned, then it should be on the grounds of abuse or exploitation.
If
the relationship can be defended, then it is a very odd, probably
invalid, argument to claim that imminent abandonment by the pedophile
justifies police intervention. Furthermore, abandonment of a child by a
pedophile is but one of the ways in which an adult-child relationship
can come to an end, if it does so at all. Interference from outside is
another way, and is probably more common.189

All three boys interviewed by us have acquired a deep resentment and
loss of respect for the police. They blame the entire case on Fred but
would not make any negative statement about Ferdinand. This case
highlights the need for the law to have power to intervene where
children are being abused and exploited for pornography. Fred V. did not
know how to set responsible limits and it is proper that he be made to
pay a penalty. It is clear that Ferdinand is capable of building up
relationships bated on mutual respect and affection, relationships which
continue after the sexual component is long over. At the same time, Ferdinand can be
accused of carelessness in his friendships with Fred  he ought to have
been able to protect his boy friends. He knew of Fred's photography.
He
was at best naive to believe Fred's promises. Nevertheless, the Justice
Department should not have taken this case further thin Fred V. The
fact that Johnny regularly wrote to and visited Ferdinand in jail and
maintained their relationship throughout and after his release,190
including the sexual contact, makes a mockery of the criminal law in
this case.

Since this case the law has changed in the Netherlands.
Sexual
contact between adults and children between 12 and 16 years has become a
"crime on complaint."191
This means that the Justice
Department cannot act if the persons involved do not want a criminal
prosecution to take place. In cases where the "victims" do not
see themselves as victims and are injured by the actions of the Justice
Department it is difficult to see any value in prosecution. The
amendment of the law in this respect is seen in the Netherlands as an
improvement. It is yet to be seen if the courts will again stretch the
definitions to eliminate the intended protection of the rights of
teenagers to make a choice in these matters.

This analysis shows how difficult it is to categorize the world into
black and white, into simple categories of good and evil. A closer look
at typical circumstances under which child pornography came into
existence, while revealing abuse and exploitation, also revealed loving
relationships and quite surprisingly resilient loyalty of some boys for
their adult friend.

Conclusions and Comments

We have called the claims about child pornography "myths."
The existence of child pornography is certainly not. The myths are the
exaggerated estimates of the number of children, the volume and value of
the trade, the profits that are alleged to have been made, and the
horrifying damage said to have been done to the children. In fact, on
many important points our conclusions are more or less the same as the
conclusions of the ILIC, the Senate Commission under William Roth, and
the De Wit work group in the Netherlands. The results of these findings
have not convinced the crusaders in the past, and no doubt our results
will be ignored by those whose political agendas are not served by the
facts.

This, of course, does not diminish the fact that several thousands of
children have been involved in the manufacture of child pornography.
The
pictures rarely showed sexual abuse, and often did not show any kind of
sexual activity. Nevertheless, the rights of 1the children as models and
actors has usually been ignored: in most cases the photographs have been
published without the permission or knowledge of the children. The use of
the images, even when no abuse has taken place in the making of them,
could be seen as an assault on the integrity of the children involved
which justifies the sanctions which now exist.

The criminal sanctions appear to be effective.
Outside the small
scale swap circuit, child pornography is no longer found, despite the
fact that the maximum penalty in the Netherlands is three months, small
in comparison with the maximum penalty for indecent behavior with a
child (six years) and heling (three years). Denmark has a fine, which
has not made the prohibition less effective. When the children can be
traced, the producers of child pornography can be charged with the crime of
indecent assault.192

Some police and Justice Department officials, including Mr. Behling,
urge for an increase in the maximum penalty. This would make it possible
to place the accused in custody while police inquiries get underway.193
In the event that it is thought necessary to make this change, despite
the demonstrable effectiveness of article 240b, this could be
accomplished by a change to the Code of Criminal Procedure.194
Enforcement of the law does not provide an argument for a review of the
maximum penalty.

Finally, there are remarkable parallels between the developments in
the United States and in the Netherlands. In both countries the
distribution of child pornography was prohibited in the interest of
protecting children, and was defined as a crime of child abuse. The
effect of the photographs on the consumer was irrelevant. In both
countries the jurisprudence has determined a criterion for prosecution
with is anchored in the effect that the photographs might have on the
viewer. In the United States this was a result of the decision in the
cases Dost and Wiegand. In the Netherlands the Supreme Court accepted
the definition of the De Wit work group in the case against Donald Mader,
in which the effect of the photograph on the viewer stands central.
All
these cases involved innocent photographs, none of which showed any
sexual activity. It is remarkable that on both sides of the Atlantic the
same shift has taken place. In both countries, dissemination of child
pornography has once again become a crime against decency.

The work leading to this study was started in September 1987. At that
time child pornography was a major issue in the Netherlands. In 1984,
the U.S. administration pressured the Dutch government to act against
the allegedly massive production and export of child pornography from
the Netherlands to the U.S. In 1986, with the enactment of a new law
against child pornography, the Dutch ministry of Justice had made the
attack a high priority. In the Spring of 1987 a photo exhibition at a
gay gallery in Amsterdam was raided for purportedly displaying child
pornography (in fact, none of the photos showed any sexual activity) and
charges were brought against the photographer, the Amsterdam-based
American Donald H. Mader (who was later convicted and required to pay a
500 guilder fine; the conviction was eventually overturned on the 30th
of March 1992 at the appeals court in Amsterdam). Most news media
uncritically copied reports from U.S. sources and from private lobbying
groups according to which child pornography trafficking constituted a
multi-million (or multi-billion) dollar underground business that exploited countless
children. Subsequent investigation found little evidence supporting
these claims.

However, the sensational reports were ostensibly vindicated by events
in the village of Oude Pekela, which started in May 1987, when Oude
Pekela became the scene of a child sex abuse affair comparable to
American day care center cases. The investigation and panic lasted for
one and a half years, eventually leading to the largest investigation by
the Dutch National Police in the history of the Netherlands. Children
were repeatedly interrogated by their teachers, social workers, police,
parents and especially by the town's general practitioners, Dr. Jonker
and his wife, Dr. Jonker-Bakker, and finally by Dr. Mik, a retired
psychiatrist. The extensive investigation never produced any evidence
that the progressively escalating stories of the children, including
allegations of child kidnapping on a large scale, use of drugs,
manufacture of child pornography and Satan worship, were true. The only
thing that could be proven was sex play between two toddlers. This event
triggered the allegations by Dr. Jonker and his wife of child sexual
abuse on a massive scale. There was plenty of evidence of mass hysteria.
(For a discussion of this, see Rossen, 1989, Mass hysteria in Oude Pekela.
Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, 1(1),
49-51.)

At the same time reports began to appear about the policy of U.S. law
enforcement agencies which involved the use of child pornography as
"bait" to entrap actual or suspected child molesters. In
general the radicalization of the policy to combat child abuse led to
major, highly publicized cases starting with the Jordan, Minnesota and
McMartin accusations in Manhattan Beach (1983-1990). Unlike the
exaggerated claims concerning the child pornography trade, reports of
American cases failed to gain significant attention in the Netherlands.

On the other hand, since the mid-1980s the Dutch media have been full
of exaggerated stories of local events, smaller in scale but
incorporating the same elements of rumor panic and collective paranoia.
Crusaders against child abuse successfully projected their political
message on the waves of public concern. We considered that a book which
analyzed the facts on the child abuse industry and the claims it is
making, would be helpful in countering the widespread ignorance of the
issues involved and the growing fears throughout the community.

In the course of 1988, we decided to give priority to writing a book
on Oude Pekela alone, which continued to be the single most important
child pornography affair in the country (even though not a trace of
pornography, or of pornographers, has ever been detected that could be related to this case).
During our investigation we made contact with the
chief officer of the Oude Pekela task force, Mr. Wim Joosten, with whom
we shared our findings. It was our belief that inexpert interrogation of
the children over a long period by many persons had led to children
telling stories based on the fears and fantasies of the people
conducting the interrogations, and ultimately to distortion of the
children's memories. The results of the Oude Pekela investigation was written up as a Masters
thesis209 by one of us (B.R.) and submitted to the University of
Amsterdam. The thesis, which deals principally with the collective
psychology of rumor panic, was later published in a summarized form.210
English translations of the book in manuscript form are available from
the author on request.211

The thesis did not include our pornography study, since no
pornography had been made in Oude Pekela and our findings were therefore
irrelevant. Nevertheless, the claims concerning the large scale of child
pornography trade that were vociferously made in the wake of the Oude
Pekela affair led us to conclude that a serious attempt should be made
to assess the actual volume of the trade, the number of children
involved and the nature of the depicted acts. This study was started as
a project to be included in a second book, which would deal with various
aspects of judicial and law enforcement policy with respect to child
abuse in the United States, and especially the influence that the U.S.A.
has had on policy development and implementation in the Netherlands.
This book has just been published.212
The present article is based on
parts of the latter book.

For the present study we were grateful to receive permission from
Professor Ernst Braches, former chief librarian of the University of
Amsterdam, to use his unpublished research for which he had counted
child pornography magazines issued since the 1950s. Through personal
contacts via the Dutch Association for Sexual Reform (NVSH) we were able
to get access to some private collections of child pornography
magazines, which we used for our analysis, and to watch a number of
films. Between 1988 and 1991 we checked sex shops in the Netherlands and
Germany for child pornography. In addition, we held a number of
interviews with persons who were in possession of first-hand knowledge
of child pornography production and dissemination. Among these were
publishers, friends and defense attorneys of persons accused of
producing and disseminating child pornography, persons who were
photographed as children and the Central Police Investigations
Information Service, drawing the attention of the latter to the recent
reemergence of magazines in Germany.

In addition, one of us (B.R.) regularly appears as expert witness in
the Dutch courts in cases where children are witnesses or
witness/victims. We are in the process of building up an archive of
cases; some show actual cases of child abuse, others show cases of
mistaken diagnosis. Borrowing from the tape analysis methods developed
by Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield, we have been able to show how
children have sometimes been manipulated to say things that may not be
true. Excerpts from two of the court reports are also included in our
book.

In cooperation with Professor Jan Wind, chairman of the Foundation
Ouders voor kinderen (Parents for Children, a private group that
deals
with false accusations of child abuse; comparable to VOCAL
in the U.S.A.
and PAIN in the United Kingdom) we are presently making an evaluation of the enforcement of laws against child abuse in the
Netherlands, and in particular of the performance of the police and the
Justice Department. The results will be published in 1993. One of us (J.S.)
is a member of the Labour Party Commission on Government and Sexual
Integrity, which is preparing proposals for a revision of the Dutch
morality laws and will be editing the final report of this committee to
be published by the end of 1992.

*Jan
Schuijer has a Masters Degree in Economics, has been working as
an adviser on legal and political issues in various Dutch
organizations, including the Dutch Association for Sexual
Reform, the Dutch Association for Gay Integration and the Labour
Party.

Benjamin Rossen, B.A., B.Sc., Dip.Ed. and a Masters Degree in
Mass Psychology from the University of
Amsterdam, teaches Theory
of Knowledge and Chemistry at an International Baccalaureate
College in the Netherlands, and is a consultant in children's
memory and children as witnesses. [Website]
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